I am the author of several books on technology and innovation. My new book, "Big Bang Disruption," co-authored with Paul F. Nunes, is now available. My earlier books include the New York Times best-seller, “Unleashing the Killer App" and "The Laws of Disruption."

Why is the UN Trying to Take over the Internet?

Yet another anachronistic regulator is trying to flex its muscles over the Internet. But this time the U.S. government is actually the one trying to stop them.

That’s right. It’s the United Nations. Specifically, the International Telecommunications Union, a 150 year-old bureaucracy that started life establishing telegraph standards. The ITU has since mutated into coordinating international telephone interconnection and radio spectrum, and became part of the U.N. in 1947. But it has never had a meaningful role in dealing with the Internet.

At least until now.

That could change dramatically later this year, when 193 member nations and hundreds of non-voting private members will meet in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT. The goal of the WCIT is to finalize changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations, an international treaty on communications.

The last major revisions to the ITRs were ratified in 1988, long before the rise of the commercial Internet. But with months to go before proposed changes to the ITR are closed, member nations and private members of the ITU have already begun lobbying for a vast expansion of Internet powers, including new network taxes, mandatory censorship technologies disguised as security measures, and efforts to undermine the Internet’s longstanding engineering-based governance processes.

Worse, Internet users who object to proposed changes may not even know what to complain about or who to complain to. Following ITU rules, the proposals are being circulated and deliberated in secret, making it difficult to know what is being proposed and who users can hold accountable.

Caught flat-footed, the ITU’s governing Council half-heartedly agreed to publish just one of the documents already leaked, with the names of members making the proposals redacted. ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure called that move a “landmark decision,” and insists in the face of the ITU’s secrecy that the agency “is as transparent as organizations are.”

That might give you some sense of just how out of touch the agency really is. And at least within the U.S., condemnation of the ITU’s dangerously amateurish behavior has been universal. Republicans and Democrats, Congress, the White House and the FCC, along with major industry representatives, consumer advocates, and engineering groups including the highly-respected and international Internet Society, have all raised alarms over both the content and the process of upcoming negotiations.

Last week, the U.S. delegation issued its own first round of proposals, making clear that the U.S. “will not support proposals that increase the exercise of control over Internet governance or content.” That followed passage in the House last week of a strongly-worded anti-WCIT resolution. The vote in favor of the resolution was unanimous.

The U.S., however, only gets one vote at the WCIT meeting. And even if the Senate refuses to ratify a new version of the ITRs passed over U.S. objections, other countries will be able to impose new rules on U.S. companies doing business abroad, backed up by the authority of the U.N.. At the very worst, a bad result at the WCIT could lead to a splintered Internet, and the further isolation of developing nations.

Why is this Happening?

From the beginning, the Internet has been governed almost exclusively by the engineers who designed it and who continue to enhance and extend its capabilities. The core standards and protocols are overseen by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Website domain names and IP addresses are registered by ICANN. And the constant redesign of the Web itself is the job of the World Wide Web Consortium. These are all multi-stakeholder, non-governmental organizations, beholden only to the over two billion Internet users around the world.

It’s not much of a stretch to say that the Internet works as well as it does precisely because it has managed to stay largely immune from interference and oversight from traditional governments—slow-moving, expensive, secretive, jealous, partisan governments.

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Larry, first allow me to thank you for this excellent piece. I for one will link out to as many people as I am able. I too am an Internet executive and quite frankly the Internet is a passion of mine, as without it I would not have had the rewarding experiences both professionally and personally I feel fortunate to have enjoyed….I am a technocrat [now over 25 years] and the opportunities I have exploited to mutual benefit, have allowed me to experience different cultures, peoples, places and I have developed many great friendships. I have recently completed a book “The8th Continent” and the following intro to my thesis is “As we move forward to “Harvest the Future” It will become clear that, although; it isn’t formally in control of the other seven, The8th should be the overwhelming manner by which we conduct affairs … prudently … in-order to reap a bountiful Harvest in our Future. The8th Continent will provide a view of the Internet as the eighth continent of humankind, the first created only by humans and ultimately providing thru collaboration a socio economic technological [SET] continent that in less than 40 years has become globally inclusive. I guarantee you that, as with all of my endeavours, 21st century thinking is the primary manner which decisions are made. The8th is not a place that should be ruled by failed early 20th century thinking and policy. As stated above “The8th should be the overwhelming manner by which we conduct affairs … prudently … in-order to reap a bountiful Harvest in our Future.” The framework by which to prudently conduct our affairs is not a reversal of engendered best practices, in favour of oversight by an institution that is a sinkhole of corrupt, oligarchic, overtly privileged, self interested Luddites. Moreover, stripping the Internet away from developing nations should be considered a crime……I implore anyone who reads this to become a 21st century thinker and craft strategy to thwart this obviously blatant attempt to garner economic gain through 20th century International policy cabals…..at the expense of our Internet future

Do you think that the MPAA will end up supporting Russia/ETNO’s position on internet regulation? Seems to me that imposing an information tax for transferring data across networks could effectively kill infringing file-sharing; no way infringing hosts, whether they operate through bittorrent, usenet, or http, could afford to pay send taxes for American video or music content consumers.

After SOPA/PIPA I’d expect for the MPAA would publicly back their position; but, given that they’d be aligning themselves with Russia, China’s (and presumably Iran’s) governments it could be a public-relations catastrophe.

Hard to say. The MPAA argues that much of the copyright infringement of their members’ content happens in Russia, and that the government there is not interested in enforcing existing copyright treaties. Their strategy has been to try for new authority within the U.S. that would, if successful, block the importation of infringing material into the U.S. It’s hard to say whether they would see the ITU as a potential ally for them or for the Russian government.

The problem is that peering isn’t always settlement free – and even if it is, if and only if there’s an equitable amount of traffic exchanged between two ISPs. And then there’s transit, where you pay another network to carry your packets for you.

Peering and transit economics are rather more complex than settlement free handshake deals, and at least these days, they’re more often than not based on contracts with every i dotted and t crossed, rather than handshake deals (though those too aren’t unknown).

This generally means that networks that have much more eyeballs than content will inevitably spend a lot of money, on international bandwidth capacity over undersea cables, transit etc, just so that their customers can reach all the content provider sites (google, fb etc), which are hosted elsewhere. This is mitigated to some extent by the use of CDNs like Akamai, local mirrors of popular sites etc, but isn’t exactly cheap.

The content providers of course are entirely against any such measure as it’d dent their profits if they were to actually pay a lot more for connectivity than they already do – and so spend quite a lot of time and money to lobby internationally, as well as hire respected names in the internet industry who, [possibly in several cases convinced that these measures are an attack on the essential freedoms of the Internet] blog, tweet, give interviews and influence articles about how pernicious these measures are, and how they’ll lead to the ultimate destruction of the Internet as we know it.

Meanwhile, the largest content providers also buy (and in some cases, even build) substantial internet bandwidth capacity between different countries and set up datacenters around the world – effectively becoming their own ISP to cut costs from what it’d cost them to buy large quantities of connectivity at retail prices.

An excellent (though rather old) paper on this was written by Geoff Huston, formerly from Telstra and now at APNIC, published in the respected Internet Protocol Journal – http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_2-1/peering_and_settlements.html

Another elephant in the room is that the internet’s coordinating bodies are, at least on paper, under the control of a US government agency – the department of commerce. http://www.ntia.doc.gov/page/iana-functions-purchase-order

While there has been a largely hands off approach on behalf of the USG so far, more than one country that doesn’t torture and censor its citizens is not quite comfortable with relying heavily on and treating as a critical resource something that is actually under firm control by the USG, should they choose to exercise it.

There is of course the traditionally utopian idea of a free and wide open internet “frontier” (as in space, the final frontier, as in that fine old time when men were men and shot their own meat, sewed their own clothes on the american frontier, as in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its declaration of independence of cyberspace), with no rules, regulations or anything other than the “Code Is Law” concept that Lawrence Lessig once proposed .. an article of faith among true believers in internet freedom.

This faith unfortunately tends to collide with reality on several occasions.

There is the extremely broad crossover between international civil and criminal law and the Internet. Someone in russia or brazil is just as capable of emptying out your bank account with a banking trojan as is a hood with a shotgun sticking up your local branch.

The virus writer (quite often with organized crime backing these days instead of just being a pimply kid hunched over an old PC in his parents’ basement) is far far less likely to get caught than the hood is, and electronic money transfers are far less easy to trace and claw back than actual banknotes are.

That’s just one case – where the concept of dual criminality (illegal in both the criminal’s and the victim’s jurisdictions) makes it relatively easy to prosecute [if there happens to be a MLAT and an extradiation treaty in place, without which prosecutors have been known to lure criminals out of their country with a phone call that says the criminal won a paid holiday in a casino resort]

And in civil law – peering and transit are, as I said, business agreements between companies, and there is a huge mass of litigation in front of various courts and regulators around the world. The same thing with say libel and defamation, tort law ..

There have been several other frameworks before – such as the Council of Europe’s Budapest convention on cybercrime, which the USA and several other countries are already signatories to (though not, I think, Russia or China, or any of the Arab states). You would also find that a lot of cybercrime happens because of vacuums in law enforcement – criminals can operate best where they fear arrest and jail and/or extradiation the least.

Back to the current governance (or shall we say coordination?) model, there’s always ICANN, not particularly a poster child for good governance. Its governance has generally been driven primarily by commercial interests, with sort of nominal participation from its Government Advisory Committee (GAC) and its Non Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) – and there has been enough criticism, within ICANN itself, and in the media (including in previous Forbes articles).

Proposals floated in ICANN, just like proposals in the WCIT or before other ITU groups in the past, or like weird and wonderful bills tabled in Congress, have been open to quite a lot of criticism in the past. Some get through and some never do see the light of day after they are tabled.

So it is unfortunately not just about rapacious telcos, repressive regimes and ITU apologists. There’s a much more complex backstory that has been completely glossed over (though to be fair it isn’t quite easy to compress over a decade’s worth of politics into a three or four page article).

In fact, that WaPo article you linked to as “by an ITU apologist”, is hardly what I’d describe as an apologia. For example, in the several years that I’ve known Milton Mueller from Syracuse University, quoted in the article, he has been a longstanding critic of ICANN, and of the ITU – and a longtime member of ICANN’s NCUC – and his views don’t tend to make him the favorite of several participants in ICANN – nor is he all that popular with several stakeholders in the ITU process.

BTW full disclosures in case they’re necessary – [1] I’m speaking entirely for myself and not for my employer. [2] I am good friends and in some cases, peers / colleagues with several people on the “other side” – registrars, content providers, civil society activists [3] i’ve written a paper on botnet mitigation for the ITU in 2007 and spoken at some of their workshops on cybercrime, the last time in I think early 2009.

Thanks for that rehash of long-standing concerns about Internet governance. We could quibble about several key facts you misstate – (1) OECD found at the end of last year that “99.5% of interconnection agreements are concluded without a written contract;” (2) ISOC reports that “in the vast majority of cases, peering arrangements are ‘settlement free’”; (3) while ICANN is based in the U.S. and still operates under a contract from the U.S. government, is hardly under the control of the U.S. government, as its complex governance and election rules make clear; (4) in any case, ICANN is only one of the “coordinating bodies” and the only one with any connection to the U.S.–ISOC and W3C have NO connection to the U.S. government and are not even located in the U.S.; (5) ICANN in any case does not devolve all voting power, as the ITU does, to 193 countries, each of whom gets one vote regardless of size or use or development of the Internet; (6) the ITU charges private member organizations thousands of dollars a year to participate; they cannot vote, and individuals cannot participate at any price; (7) I didn’t say the NYT article was written “by an ITU apologist”–I said that ITU apologists were giving “calming words” and I linked to the article, which quoted several dismissive sources.

More to the point, even if Internet governance was on the verge of collapse (which it is not), the ITU is the last place we should turn to to make it better, considerably behind the Easter Bunny or Lex Luthor from Superman comic books. It has no experience, no engineering representation, no transparency and, as the last few months have made crystal clear, a tin ear when it comes to responding to legitimate concerns of Internet users. We’d be better off just throwing darts.

sort of, yes. it is no longer a handshake deal in most cases though it could well be settlement free. The smaller operators and cdns tend to peer a lot more enthusiastically than larger telcos, especially those that stand to gain from selling connectivity to smaller providers. http://www.circleid.com/posts/20120628_report_on_oecd_berec_workshop_on_interconnection_and_regulation/ is a summary of geoff huston’s presentaton at the oecd workshop.

I am sorry if i gave you the impression that icann needs to be dumped and all governance needs to go to the ITU. That wasnt my point at all. Just that several countries have concerns about ICANN governance issues, starting off with even nominal amd on paper control. Or I should say operational issues where commercial interests are routinely seen to trump advice and feedback from governments. Governments tend not to like that, and in the ITU they have a voice where the private players dont have much of one. A mirror image of ICANN’s dynamics. No surprise then thst even some democracies are quite supportive.

A very similar control battle keeps getting played out in the RIRs.. where ITU was pushing hard for countries to be in control of their own IP allocation rather than having to depend on thr RIRs. This played out rather more intensively in the asiapac region..

The most worrisome WCIT proposals, as I made clear in the article, have nothing to do with areas of Internet governance even close to ICANN’s domain. But even if ICANN were overtaken by wizards, giving more authority to the ITU would only make matters worse. Much worse.

A matter of perspective I guess. I assume the sender paid proposals are what inspired that comment. if so, there is a lot of reason to expect it to fall apart even if mandated by fiat. http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-06/noqos.html?goback=%2Egsm_77819_1_*2_*2_*2_lna_PENDING_*2%2Egmr_77819%2Egde_77819_member_128596222